Rude awakening in the Congo
The shooting starts at 3am, loud booms close at hand which, suddenly waking, I tell myself were caused by the wind rattling the glass of the church mission house in which I am staying. I open a window and stare across the Congo river, gulls flying over, agitated. There is no wind. I can’t work out what the sounds are and go back to bed, imagining a typhoon somewhere.
When I awake at 6am, I discover what the typhoon was. Troops have broken out of Thatshi barracks a few blocks from the mission house, and are causing mayhem. They are attacking military bases and TV stations, in an apparent coup attempt against Congo’s president, Joseph Kabila. Our driver from the Catholic pastoral care organisation Caritas reports in. He has been stopped at gunpoint. Soldiers were ahead of him and behind, he said, so he couldn’t move. He was slapped twice, but one of the soldiers intervened and said, “Not that.” Instead they ordered him out the car and let him run for it. It was 6.40am and had I been the driver, I would have headed home immediately. But he had walked nearly two miles, first to the mission house to warn staff that we wouldn’t be picked up that morning, then to the home of our translator. The driver earns a dollar a day.
Our translator didn’t seek refuge at home either. She and the driver took a taxi to the mission house. Their way was blocked, so they got out and walked, with street fighting all around and the sound of mortar fire close by. “When will things get back to normal in the country?” asks the translator as we nervously drink coffee in the breakfast room. “We are sick and tired of all this.” The irony is that Kinshasa was supposed to be safe, recovering from a decade of intermittent war. There has been nothing like this for five years here. The east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had spent the perevious week, was thought to be the dangerous part. Yet Goma, the main city in the east, had seemed almost sleepy. Perhaps all the damage there had already been done: what survived the war had been destroyed by the volcanic eruptions of 2002, long snakes of lava consuming the cathedral and the oldest part of the town. There were no cars left to steal; nothing to loot.
The gunfire lasts all morning and echoes sporadically through the afternoon, though the attackers have apparently been brought to heel. The mission house, set in gardens next to the church of Sainte Anne de la Gombe, was built by the Belgians in 1920 and normally exudes peace. But not today. Sunday it may be, but mass in the chapel is infiltrated by the events outside. The singing takes the alto part, while the bass is provided by the thud of mortars beyond. “Why are the troops rebelling?” I ask Sister De Clerck, who is also trapped in the mission house, unable to get to her office across the street. “They are not being paid,” she says. “They have been restless for a long time and they have the means to get what they want.” How bad might it get? I ask. “Sometimes nothing happens; sometimes everything happens,” she says laconically.
Sister De Clerck is a Belgian from the Order of Notre Dame de Namur. She has been in Kinshasa for 30 years, running an anti-diabetes programme, and in the DRC for 50 years. She is 77, and says she will only go home when she can no longer contribute anything. “I don’t want to be a burden on these people,” she says. There used to be 60 European sisters from her order in Congo; now there is just her. “The people here are good people,” she says. “But they are fed up with all the politics because nothing ever changes. I have seen so much shooting and looting in the past 10 years, but I have never been harmed. I get very frightened, but my faith sees me through.” In a lull in the fighting, she decides to try to get across the street. “Good luck with all your work,” I mumble. “Thank you,” she says. “Enjoy your stay.”
← A boy's own hero
Bayreuth or bust? →
